Accelerando

by Charles Stross

  “So? Don’t brood.” Annette pulls her hand back. “Something will sort itself out eventually. And in the short term, there is the work. The electoral problem becomes acute.” When she’s around him the remains of her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a transatlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He’s been abhuman for too long—people who meant a lot to him have changed while he’s been away.

  “I’ll brood if I want to,” he says. “I didn’t ever really get a chance to say goodbye to Pam, did I? Not after that time in Paris when the gangsters . . .” He shrugs. “I’m getting nostalgic in my old age.” He snorts.

  “You’re not the only one,” Annette says tactfully. “Social occasions here are a minefield. One must tiptoe around so many issues. People have too much, too much history. And nobody knows everything that is going on.”

  “That’s the trouble with this damned polity.” Manfred takes another gulp of hefeweisen. “We’ve already got six million people living on this planet, and it’s growing like the first-generation Internet. Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there are so many incomers diluting the mix and not knowing that there is a small world network here that everything is up for grabs again after only a couple of megaseconds. New networks form, and we don’t even know they exist until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. We’re acting under time pressure. If we don’t get things rolling now, we’ll never be able to . . .” He shakes his head. “It wasn’t like this for you in Brussels, was it?”

  “No. Brussels was a mature system. And I had Gianni to look after in his dotage after you left. It will only get worse from here on in, I think.”

  “Democracy 2.0.” He shudders briefly. “I’m not sure about the validity of voting projects at all, these days. The assumption that all people are of equal importance seems frighteningly obsolescent. Do you think we can make this fly?”

  “I don’t see why not. If Amber’s willing to play the People’s Princess for us . . .” Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and chews on it meditatively.

  “I’m not sure it’s workable, however we play it.” Manfred looks thoughtful. “The whole democratic participation thing looks questionable to me under these circumstances. We’re under direct threat, for all that it’s a long-term one, and this whole culture is in danger of turning into a classical nation-state. Or worse, several of them layered on top of one another with complete geographical collocation but no social interpenetration. I’m not certain it’s a good idea to try to steer something like that—pieces might break off. You’d get the most unpleasant side effects. Although, on the other hand, if we can mobilize enough broad support to become the first visible planetwide polity . . .”

  “We need you to stay focused,” Annette adds unexpectedly.

  “Focused? Me?” He laughs, briefly. “I used to have an idea a second. Now it’s maybe one a year. I’m just a melancholy old birdbrain, me.”

  “Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas—the hedgehog has only one, but it’s a big idea.”

  “So tell me, what is my big idea?” Manfred leans forward, one elbow on the table, one eye focused on inner space as a hot-burning thread of consciousness barks psephological performance metrics at him, analyzing the game ahead. “Where do you think I’m going?”

  “I think—” Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder. Privacy slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances round in mild horror and sees thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden, elbows rubbing, voices raised above the background chatter. “Gianni!” She beams widely as she stands up. “What a surprise! When did you arrive?”

  Manfred blinks. A slim young guy, moving with adolescent grace but none of the awkward movements and sullen lack of poise—he’s much older than he looks, chickenhawk genetics. Gianni? He feels a huge surge of memories paging through his exocortex. He remembers ringing a doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: white toweling bathrobe, the economics of scarcity, autograph signed by the dead hand of von Neumann—“Gianni?” he asks, disbelieving. “It’s been a long time!”

  The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy from the noughties, grins widely and embraces Manfred with a friendly bear hug. Then he slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he kisses with easy familiarity. “Ah, to be among friends again! It’s been too long!” He glances round curiously. “Hmm, how very Bavarian.” He snaps his fingers. “Mine will be a, what do you recommend? It’s been too long since my last beer.” His grin widens. “Not in this body.”

  “You’re resimulated?” Manfred asks, unable to stop himself.

  Annette frowns at him disapprovingly. “No, silly! He came through the teleport gate—”

  “Oh.” Manfred shakes his head. “I’m sorry—”

  “It’s okay.” Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn’t mind being mistaken for an historical newbie, rather than someone who’s traveled through the decades the hard way. He must be over a hundred by now, Manfred notes, not bothering to spawn a search thread to find out.

  “It was time to move and, well, the old body didn’t want to move with me, so why not go gracefully and accept the inevitable?”

  “I didn’t take you for a dualist,” Manfred says ruefully.

  “Ah, I’m not—but neither am I reckless.” Gianni drops his grin for a moment. The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic theoretician, then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious. “I have never uploaded before, or switched bodies, or teleported. Even when my old one was seriously—tcha! Maybe I left it too long. But here I am. One planet is as good as another to be cloned and downloaded onto, don’t you think?”

  “You invited him?” Manfred asks Annette.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” There’s a wicked gleam in her eye. “Did you expect me to live like a nun while you were a flock of pigeons? We may have campaigned against the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred, but there are limits.”

  Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarrassed. “I’m still getting used to being human again,” he admits. “Give me time to catch up? At an emotional level, at least.” The realization that Gianni and Annette have a history together doesn’t come as a surprise to him: It’s one of the things you must adapt to if you opt out of the human species, after all. At least the libido suppression is helping here, he realizes. He’s not about to embarrass anyone by suggesting a ménage. He focuses on Gianni. “I have a feeling I’m here for a purpose, and it isn’t mine,” he says slowly. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got in mind?”

  Gianni shrugs. “You have the big picture already. We are human, metahuman, and augmented human. But the posthumans are things that were never really human to begin with. The Vile Offspring have reached their adolescence and want the place to themselves so they can throw a party. The writing is on the wall, don’t you think?”

  Manfred gives him a long stare. “The whole idea of running away in meatspace is fraught with peril,” he says slowly. He picks up his mug of beer and swirls it around slowly. “Look, we know, now, that a singularity doesn’t turn into a voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of space—at least, not unless they’ve done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone.

  “But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we’ll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that’s what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don’t we? So . . . maybe you can tell me what you think we should do. Hmm?”

  “It’s a dilemma.” A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened field of view. It plants a spun-diamond
glass in front of Gianni, then pukes beer into it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to drink. “Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh! I’ve been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai +4904/-56. I found it quite alarming. Nobody’s casting aspersions on her observations, not after that self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications—the Vile Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they’ll slow down. But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans like us to do?”

  Manfred nods thoughtfully. “You’ve heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?” he asks.

  “Of course.” Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. “What do you think of our options?”

  “The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwhisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that’s succumbed to senile dementia and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfill some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau’s universal robots. I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she’s done it before—at least, the charging off aboard a starwhisp part. ‘To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before’ has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?” Manfred nods to himself. “Like I say, it won’t work. We’d be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving. That’s why I came back: to warn her.”

  “So?” Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his way.

  “And as for the time-binders”—Manfred nods again—“they’re like Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn—then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony habitats on snowballs half a light year from anywhere.” He shudders. “Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour walk to the nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or Objectivism. No thanks! I know they’ve been muttering about quantum teleportation and stealing toys from the routers, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Which leaves what?” Annette demands. “It is all very well, this dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder programs, Manny, but what can you propose in their place?” She looks distressed. “Fifty years ago, you would have had six new ideas before breakfast! And an erection.”

  Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. “Who says I can’t still have both?”

  She glares. “Drop it!”

  “Okay.” Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his glass, and puts it down on the table with a bang. “As it happens, I do have an alternative idea.” He looks serious. “I’ve been discussing it with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it—if it’s to work optimally, we’ll need to get a rump constituency of both the accelerationistas and the conservatives on board. Which is why I’m conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense. So, what’s it worth to you for me to explain it?”

  “So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?” asks Amber.

  Rita shrugs. “Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions—I kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from fear once I mentioned implants. We really need to nail down how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don’t we?” She watches Amber with something approaching admiration; she’s new to the inner circle of the accelerationista study faction, and Amber’s social credit is sky-high. Rita’s got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, following her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum seems like a golden moment of opportunity.

  Amber smiles. “I’m glad I’m not processing immigrants these days: Most of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit. Personally I blame the Flynn effect—in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It’s nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can’t fix in a year or two, but after the first few you skullfuck, they’re all the same. So dull. Unless you’re unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan religious period. I’m no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more superstitious woman-hating clergyman, I’m going to consider prescribing forcible gender reassignment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social reserve. And they like new technology.”

  Rita nods. Woman-hating et cetera . . . The echoes of patriarchy are still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of resimulated ayatollahs and archbishops from the Dark Ages. “My author sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat wings and tentacles or something.” Like your son, she doesn’t add. Just what was he thinking, anyway? she wonders. To be that screwed up takes serious dedication . . . “What are you working on, if you don’t mind me asking?” she asks, trying to change the direction of her attention.

  “Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie ’Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day.” She pulls a face. “I had another fitting session with the image merchants. They’re trying to turn me into a political catwalk clotheshorse. Then there’s the program demographics again. We’re getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planetwide, but it’s accelerating rapidly, and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early a quarter of the electorate won’t know what they’re meant to be voting about.”

  “Maybe it’s deliberate,” Rita suggests. “The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters.” She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday’s open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. “The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass of cranberry juice to her. “Dad said one thing that’s spot-on. We’re framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?”

  Rita looks vacant for a moment. “Is that a question?” she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. “Then I’d have to say that I don’t know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I’m not really happy. The Offspring won’t tell us what they want, but there’s no reason to believe they don’t know what we want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can’t they?”

  Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. “I really don’t know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist—the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that’s gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire presingularity net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the right way to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don’t know about. Or it might be a message we’re simply not smart enough to decode. That’s the trouble, we don’t know.”

  She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. “What else?” she pants.

  “Could be”—left turn—“anything, real
ly.” Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel; fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. “Question is, why don’t they”—left turn—“just tell us what they want?”

  “Speaking to tapeworms.” Rita nearly manages to catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she’s memorized it perfectly. “That’s how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can outthink us by, as humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?”

  “Maybe.” Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They’re in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen-stained with age. “I think you know the answer to that question.”

  “I—” Rita stares at her.

  Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. “You’re from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That’s what you told me. You’ve got a skill set that’s a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what are you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?”

  “I—” Rita’s face crumples. “I didn’t push his buttons! He thought I was trying to drag him into bed.” She looks up defiantly. “I wasn’t. I want to learn, what makes you—him—work—” Huge, dark, structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It’s the ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public record for truth. “What are you doing?”